The inside story of Aaron Swartz’s campaign to liberate court filings

And how his allies are trying to finish the job by tearing down a big paywall.

Years before the JSTOR scraping project that led to Aaron Swartz's indictment on federal hacking charges—and perhaps to his suicide—the open-data activist scraped documents from PACER, the federal judiciary's paywalled website for public access to court records. (The acronym PACER stands for Public Access to Court Electronic Records, which may sound like it's straight out of 1988 because it is.) Swartz got 2.7 million documents before the courts detected his downloads and blocked access. The case was referred to the FBI, which investigated Swartz's actions but declined to prosecute him.

A key figure in Swartz's PACER effort was Steve Schultze, now a researcher at Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy. Schultze recruited Swartz to the PACER fight and wrote the Perl script Swartz modified and then used to scrape the site.

Until recently, Schultze has been quiet about his role in Swartz's PACER scraping caper. But Swartz's death inspired Schultze to speak out. In a recent phone interview, Schultze described how Swartz downloaded gigabytes of PACER data and how that data has been put to use throughout the last four years. Schultze told us he hopes the outrage over Swartz's death will provide momentum for legislation to finish the job Swartz and Schultze started almost five years ago: tearing down PACER's paywall.

In the interest of full disclosure: Schultze and I were colleagues at Princeton while I was in grad school there from 2009 to 2011. With another Princeton graduate student, Harlan Yu, we created RECAP, a Firefox extension that helps PACER users share documents they purchase both with each other and the public. And Carl Malamud, who played a key role in our story, provided financial support for some of my PACER-related research during this period.

The thumb drive corps

The documents in PACER—motions, legal briefs, scheduling orders, and the like—are public records. Most of these documents are free of copyright restrictions, yet the courts charge hefty fees for access. Even as the costs of storage and bandwidth have declined over the last decade, PACER fees have risen from seven to 10 cents per page.

Facing criticism that high fees limit public access, the US courts announced a pilot project in 2007 to provide free PACER access to users at 17 libraries around the country. Schultze and other open government activists saw the announcement as an opportunity to liberate documents from the PACER system.

Schultze began working on a Perl script to automate the process of downloading documents from PACER. He envisioned a "thumb drive corps" of volunteers going into libraries, plugging in thumb drives containing his script (packaged as a Windows executable), and using the library's free access to download millions of PACER documents.

Schultze developed and tested the script using a personal PACER account, paying for every document he downloaded. The nearest library participating in the PACER program was more than a hundred miles from his home in the Boston area, so he would need help from volunteers around the country to put the plan into action.

In the summer of 2008, Schultze told Swartz, also in the Boston area at the time, about the PACER scraping scheme. "He said what Aaron would always say: 'show me the code,'" Schultze told Ars. "So I showed him the code. He said, 'Oh, I don't really like Perl. I'm not a Perl programmer.' Then he took my Perl code and made a whole bunch of great improvements."

“This is not how we do things”

Schultze and Swartz conferred with open government advocate Carl Malamud, who offered to provide server space to store the gigabytes of data they hoped to liberate. For the documents to be useful, they needed to capture not only the PDFs themselves but also docket files that contain key metadata such as filing dates and document descriptions.

Steve Schultze's version of the Perl script Swartz used to liberate 2.7 million documents from PACER.

Steve Schultze

In early September, Swartz e-mailed Malamud to discuss an alternative approach: instead of sending volunteers to libraries, they could crawl PACER directly from Malamud's server. Malamud was skeptical. "The thumb drive corps is based on going to the library and using their access," he noted. "Do you have some kind of magic account or something?"

Swartz asked a friend to go to a Sacramento library that was participating in the program. After the librarian logged the friend into the library's PACER account, the friend extracted an authentication cookie set by the PACER site. Because this cookie wasn't tied to any specific IP address, it allowed access to the library's PACER account from anywhere on the Internet. But Swartz admitted to Malamud that he didn't have the library's permission to use this cookie for off-site scraping.

"This is not how we do things," Malamud scolded in a September 4 e-mail. "We don't cut corners, we belly up to the bar and get permission."

"Fair enough," Swartz replied. "Stephen is building a team to go to the library."

But without telling Malamud or Schultze, Swartz pushed forward with his offsite scraping plan. Rather than using Malamud's server, he began crawling PACER from Amazon cloud servers.

"I thought at the time he was actually in the libraries" downloading the documents that were accumulating on his server, Malamud told Ars in a phone interview. In reality, Swartz merely had to dispatch a volunteer to the library once a week to get a fresh authentication cookie. Swartz could do the rest of the work from the comfort of his apartment.

Access denied

It took a while for the courts to figure out what was happening. "The way the library trial was set up was that the courts would continue to track usage but would simply never bill the libraries for the usage that occurred," Schultze told us.

Swartz started his downloading in early September. On September 29, court administrators noticed the Sacramento library racked up a $1.5 million bill. The feds shut down the library's account.

The courts issued a vague statement about suspending the program "pending an evaluation." A few weeks later, a court official revealed law enforcement had been called to investigate the suspected security breach. Malamud told us that after Swartz fessed up, Malamud grilled him to understand whether any laws had been broken. Malamud believes the fact that neither PACER nor the library had terms of service prohibiting offsite downloading made it likely Swartz's actions were within the law.

Malamud thought they would be in an even stronger position if they could demonstrate the value of the data Swartz extracted, so he began an intensive privacy audit. For most of October, Malamud worked around the clock searching for documents containing Social Security numbers and other sensitive information. Out of the 2.7 million documents Swartz downloaded—about 700GB of data in all—Malamud discovered about 1,600 with privacy issues. He then sent a report to court administrators disclosing the poorly redacted documents he had found and encouraging the courts to examine the rest of the documents in PACER to ferret out similar privacy problems.

Malamud and Swartz wanted to tell their side of the story to the public, so they began talking to a reporter at the New York Times. The result was an article in February 2009 explaining the issue and Swartz's actions.

"This was part of how Aaron approached things," Schultze told us. His PACER activities were "a project to liberate the documents but also an effort to make public the problems that existed to hopefully solve the larger policy problem."

Both the FBI and the Department of Justice investigated the case. They identified Swartz via his ownership of the Amazon servers used to crawl PACER. Both agencies dropped the case by April 2009. Later that year, Swartz made an open records request for his own FBI file and gleefully posted it online, calling it "truly delightful."

Timothy B. Lee
Timothy covers tech policy for Ars, with a particular focus on patent and copyright law, privacy, free speech, and open government. His writing has appeared in Slate, Reason, Wired, and the New York Times. Emailtimothy.lee@arstechnica.com//Twitter@binarybits

153 Reader Comments

Dealing with numerous local government agencies, I have found that these "fees" are generally tacked on because of their contracts with third party private contractors. For example, our county assesses property tax which can be paid online via a third party but there is a "convenience fee" of $10-15. It's not a credit card fee because they charge it even when we pay from a bank account. I end up writing a check and sending it by mail.

While I'm in general agreement with the concept of open access public records once finalized, I disagree with the offsite cookie method of scraping the database and find it suprising he was not prosecuted for it.

Like it or not, Swartz was definitely operating in a grey area when it comes to ethics.

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Regards an 'open pacer', perhaps the fees could be structured towards having staff redact and prepare for open publication appropriate documents?

Had to research something for work a couple years ago, to make sure it complied with state laws. I was quite surprised to find that the actual state laws were behind a paywall! Publication of state laws had been outsourced to a "helpful" legal firm, that charged for access, to recoup their expenses. Unbelievable!

Schultze believes the courts could shift their servers to the cloud with minimal technical changes. "They would just start up a new virtual machine for every court. Each court could continue to administer their own PACER instance. There's no complicated engineering required."

Speaking as someone overhauling infrastructure to run on the AWS cloud, that would be funny if he weren't apparently serious. Shit is *not* easy. Even after a few months of careful effort and controlled migration, my site is still tightly bound to running in one region of the AWS cloud, with extensive manual setup of IAM (because the ARNs themselves are often region-specific).

Making documents owned by the public actually available to the public without fees? Yeah I'd say so. The PACER documents tell the many stories of what happens in our public courts, so it's nearly impossible to hold the judicial branch of our government accountable without them.

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but I'm still not getting why this justifies suicide

It doesn't, at all. Arguably the over-aggressive federal prosecution over Swartz's JSTOR scraping (a totally separate story, though in similar spirit to this one), coupled with his bipolar disorder, were what led to his suicide. So it was likely a matter of a mental predisposition to severe negativity plus a strong external trigger, not some carefully-reasoned "justification"; people in good mental health generally don't kill themselves, you know.

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or why we're glorifying suicide as a solution.

Nobody here is doing that. Suicide is a serious tragedy for family and friends and colleagues, and in this case for anyone who cares about justice and government intimidation as well.

The immediate solution, to comply with the spirit of charging for access to PACER, would be to open it for free during a fiscal year when they met their expenses. Even at $20 mil (the "inefficient" estimate), that would give roughly 8-9 months of free, private access (1/5th the total year's revenue). Do I think any judge out there would give up their [del]embezzlement[/del] IT bonus fees? Not a bit.

However, personally, they should definitely be providing an itemized list of expenses (even if some of those are "contractor fees"). This IS a government office function, after all.

While I'm in general agreement with the concept of open access public records once finalized, I disagree with the offsite cookie method of scraping the database and find it suprising he was not prosecuted for it.

Like it or not, Swartz was definitely operating in a grey area when it comes to ethics.

...

Regards an 'open pacer', perhaps the fees could be structured towards having staff redact and prepare for open publication appropriate documents?

He was going before a Federal criminal court because of one and only one thing. His hacking of MIT's system. If it weren't for that this would have been a simple local matter where he would have been facing breaking and entering or trespassing changers in criminal court and civil court for the 'copyright infringement.'

So this all seems noble and everything, but I'm still not getting why this justifies suicide, or why we're glorifying suicide as a solution.

He committed suicide because he couldn't face the fact that he was going to spend a few weeks to maybe a few months in federal prison for his hacking MIT's system. He was an idealist but not much of an activist. He didn't have the backbone required to face his accusers in court and defend his actions.

I'm all for open access and no paywalls but Aaron's actions in regards to PACER are not acceptable. The fact that he was told no and went ahead to do it anyways rubs me all the wrong ways. It's a clear indication of spoiled child, not an adult.

He committed suicide because he couldn't face the fact that he was going to spend a few weeks to maybe a few months in federal prison for his hacking MIT's system. He was an idealist but not much of an activist. He didn't have the backbone required to face his accusers in court and defend his actions.

I suggest you do some reading about clinical depression, because your statement sounds woefully ignorant.

Had to research something for work a couple years ago, to make sure it complied with state laws. I was quite surprised to find that the actual state laws were behind a paywall! Publication of state laws had been outsourced to a "helpful" legal firm, that charged for access, to recoup their expenses. Unbelievable!

I run into the same thing with federal laws all the time- maybe not as directly as that though. Many federal statutes refer to specific industry standards that have to be complied with and many of those industry standards can only be obtained by paying a pretty substantial sum and then they're updated fairly regularly to keep you paying for the latest versions.

I'm curious about this claim of yours: "The documents in PACER—motions, legal briefs, scheduling orders, and the like—are public records. Most of these documents are free of copyright restrictions, yet the courts charge hefty fees for access."

Considering the fact that the majority of the documents on PACER are the original works of authorship of the private parties (and not the court), how did you determine that "most" of the documents are "free of copyright restrictions"? It seems clear to me that the opposite would be true. I'd love to know how it is you think these documents lose their copyright.

I guess this explains why Are took such an apologetic editorial stance towards Swartz' criminal activities at MIT.

That, and Ars being technologically literate enough to understand that his actions weren't reasonably deserving of felony criminal charges. It's probably mostly the latter, given that only Tim has worked with him.

If pacer documents weren't 10 cents a page, how would a lawyer turnaround and charge his clients $1.00?

Umm, they wouldn't? Mostly because they don't need to, and if they were caught doing so (and it's easily traceable, so it's a stupid thing to play that game with) it would be an ethical breach? All of the lawyers I know charge real cost for Pacer access fees, postage, court fees, etc.

Now, the part where they charge for their own time or their staff's time involved in pulling documents, research, etc is a completely different subject, but last I checked, everyone who works for a living (and isn't doing it Pro Bono) does that in one way or another.

The "money maker" here for attorneys is, has always been, and will always be their own time. They don't need pacer fees to charge for their research time on court documents and case law.

Had to research something for work a couple years ago, to make sure it complied with state laws. I was quite surprised to find that the actual state laws were behind a paywall! Publication of state laws had been outsourced to a "helpful" legal firm, that charged for access, to recoup their expenses. Unbelievable!

I run into the same thing with federal laws all the time- maybe not as directly as that though. Many federal statutes refer to specific industry standards that have to be complied with and many of those industry standards can only be obtained by paying a pretty substantial sum and then they're updated fairly regularly to keep you paying for the latest versions.

That depends on how the specific regulations are incorporated by reference, though. Also, NFPA needs funding, I guess.

Thank you to those who clarified for me that this story and the charges he faced don't have all that much to do with each other. I thought this was explaining his "crime" and what he killed himself for, but this is about events before that (right?).

I'm curious about this claim of yours: "The documents in PACER—motions, legal briefs, scheduling orders, and the like—are public records. Most of these documents are free of copyright restrictions, yet the courts charge hefty fees for access."

Considering the fact that the majority of the documents on PACER are the original works of authorship of the private parties (and not the court), how did you determine that "most" of the documents are "free of copyright restrictions"? It seems clear to me that the opposite would be true. I'd love to know how it is you think these documents lose their copyright.

Good question. There's very little caselaw on this question, but it's generally assumed that court filings can be freely redistributed even if they were authored by private parties.

I think there are two general theories about this. One is an "implied license" theory--that when a lawyer files a document in court he's implicitly giving the world a liberal license to redistribute it. The other is a fair use argument, that the nature of legal filings means that redistributing them is almost always fair use. Either way, RECAP and others sites have been re-distributing PACER documents for years and AFAIK no one has ever sued them for it.

Thank you to those who clarified for me that this story and the charges he faced don't have all that much to do with each other. I thought this was explaining his "crime" and what he killed himself for, but this is about events before that (right?).

Right. I tried to make that clear in the first sentence of the article.

I'm not opposed to charging a fee for access to public documents. But $ .10/page is extortionate! It cannot bear any resemblance to the cost of providing storage and bandwidth. If they're using PACER to fund general court budgets, they're doing it wrong.

So what we see here is that Swartz was indeed a pattern criminal, and no matter what spin you try to put on this, Ars, you are trying to paint him as a victim when he wasn't. Could we move off the sappy melodrama, propping this criminal up as some kind of hero and get back to why we read Ars, please? Leave this kind of crap to MTV and CourtTV with a Bill Kurtis voiceover about how wonderful he was and what a victim he was blah blah blah.

Malamud has it right -- YOU DON'T DO THINGS THIS WAY. Just because you don't like some law, doesn't mean you don't have to work within the framework to fix it. This isn't civil disobedience, this is wanton, blatant, pre-meditated criminal activity. He went to someone for advice, didn't like the advice, and went out on his own, breaking the law.

I think Mountain Dew should be available in drinking fountains and out of a tap in my kitchen. The wonderfulness of that nectar should be freely available to every human alive free of charge. That doesn't mean I get to walk into a 7-Eleven and empty the cooler and shelves of Mountain Dew, distribute it to everyone I see, and call it "liberating the Dew". What maudlin crap!

Stop romanticizing crime for crying out loud!!! The more of these stories you publish, the more jaundiced I become toward your other posts!!

Was the prosecution harsh and out of line? Maybe but it happens every year to dozens of people and no one says anything about it. Does it mean things need to change? Not necessarily. Swartz obviously had no regard for the rules and laws. It doesnt matter if you agree with them or not you do not have the right to do as you see fit.

There are plenty of people that say things about prosecutors being harsh and out of line. That abuse is common doesn't make it not abuse and it doesn't make it acceptable behavior. They are generally less publicized than this, but it by no means uncommon. It is an enormous problem, since it leads to a higher prison population. That means we've got plenty of people that could be getting good jobs and paying taxes being unable to find employment in the future and costing us taxes. Furthermore, the high rate of imprisonment of nonviolent offenders leads to the creation of new violent offenders. We've subverted the founding principles of this country to feed a handful of money making rackets.

I'm curious about this claim of yours: "The documents in PACER—motions, legal briefs, scheduling orders, and the like—are public records. Most of these documents are free of copyright restrictions, yet the courts charge hefty fees for access."

Considering the fact that the majority of the documents on PACER are the original works of authorship of the private parties (and not the court), how did you determine that "most" of the documents are "free of copyright restrictions"? It seems clear to me that the opposite would be true. I'd love to know how it is you think these documents lose their copyright.

It's a tricky subject. For one thing, many shorter filings are questionable in terms of whether they are capable of being covered by copyright, given their highly boilerplate nature and reliance on facts and citations.

Exhibits retain their original copyright, where applicable. But the simple truth is that most exhibits are not copyrightable, as in the majority of cases they are public domain documents such as government records (just because it's "your" birth certificate does not mean you have any copyright on it, etc).

Larger original works (briefs/etc) are probably covered by copyright.

At issue, however, is the conflict of copyright with public records and the requirement for public access to said records. My understanding is that while a third party can not take an exhibit in your court filing that is copyrighted and use it in some other way that would be a direct violation of your copyright, you also can not block the copying which occurs in direct reference to it being a public record... particularly by the court, but there are arguments that this applies to copying by all parties so long as it remains within that scope. But I'm not a lawyer, and you'd really need to sit down with some relevant case law to draw any strong conclusions.

Copyright basically becomes at odds with public access rights, with access being generally considered the prevalent issue, so long as the nature of reproduction is limited to that.

Beyond that, I believe the statement was "most documents are free of copyright restrictions," which to my own knowledge is generally the case. Most court documents don't qualify for copyright to begin with. Forms filled out with facts (like your average bankruptcy filing), etc.

Schultze believes the courts are breaking the law by charging 10 cents a page for public documents. As then-senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) pointed out in a 2009 letter, the 2002 E-Government Act, which authorizes PACER fees, permits them to be charged only "to the extent necessary" to cover the costs of providing the service. In its legislative report, the Senate committee behind the bill stated it "intends to encourage the Judicial Conference to move from a fee structure in which electronic docketing systems are supported primarily by user fees to a fee structure in which this information is freely available to the greatest extent possible."

There is nothing in the Constitution or in its Amendments that guarantees freedom of government records (though maybe there should be). Schultze, Scwarz and others claim that this information should be made freely available (though that really just means paid for by general tax dollars). Whatever the costs of running a huge database, there ARE costs. Charging for access to the system simply means that cost is covered by a usage tax and not an income tax. Therefore only the people that use the system have to incur the cost ala road tolls, which seems fair to me.

Was the prosecution harsh and out of line? Maybe [. . .] Does it mean things need to change? Not necessarily.

Have to love this attitude.

It reminds me of a West Wing episode. The White House deputy chief of staff is going around all day, bemused by a poll that says that 68% of people believe we give too much in foreign aid, and 59% think it should be cut. Finally at the end of the day, somebody asks him why he likes that stat so much: "Because 9% think it's too high and shouldn't be cut! 9% of respondents could not fully get their arms around the question."

Of course things need to change. The fact that changing a MAC address and downloading some documents can constitute crimes for which you can be imprisoned for 30 years is a disgusting miscarriage of justice. That they were only planning to use the 30 year sentence as a threat to cow him into not fighting the charges doesn't make it better, it makes it worse.

I honestly don't know when the US became this bloodthirsty about crime. Maybe it has always been like this. It doesn't matter, it just needs to change. When one looks at the company we keep by pretty much any metric about crime, it's truly nauseating. Why does no other Western nation have a problem this bad?

I'm not opposed to charging a fee for access to public documents. But $ .10/page is extortionate! It cannot bear any resemblance to the cost of providing storage and bandwidth.

You know this for a fact that it couldn't possibly cost $.10/page? Do you know how many petabytes of information are available from court systems across this country? Do you have any idea how much advantage technology companies take of government institutions in their pricing and fixed bid contracts? How much does it cost to convert the reams and reams of paper documents that still exist in court processes across the country to digital formats?

What tax would you rather have imposed upon you to pay for the resources to host this information? It isn't free, and it isn't cheap. The docs aren't on a USB hard drive connected to someone's laptop going out over a cable modem.

While I agree that a per page pricing model seems silly in an era where the docs aren't being copied, paying for the infrastructure is reasonable provided what this does. And if it eliminates some tax appropriation being placed on me when I don't want or need access to this information, those who need it should pay for it.

@knbgnuYour saying that you're willing to work in an environment with pattern criminals who have no regard for your laws and rules simply because they are nonviolent? Thats just silly and puts the rest of us good citizens in a shitty position. A criminal id s criminal and they need to be punished and probably sent to jail. Also your making it seem like swartz is the common type of nonviolent criminal being locked up. He isn't most of the things your saying while true are generally referring to nonviolent drug criminals.

Malamud has it right -- YOU DON'T DO THINGS THIS WAY. Just because you don't like some law, doesn't mean you don't have to work within the framework to fix it. This isn't civil disobedience, this is wanton, blatant, pre-meditated criminal activity. He went to someone for advice, didn't like the advice, and went out on his own, breaking the law.

Actually, he merely moved from a blindingly white area to a less white area with a hint of legal gray. Also, civil disobedience universally involves breaking the law. If it's not breaking the law, it's civil obedience.

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I think Mountain Dew should be available in drinking fountains and out of a tap in my kitchen. The wonderfulness of that nectar should be freely available to every human alive free of charge. That doesn't mean I get to walk into a 7-Eleven and empty the cooler and shelves of Mountain Dew, distribute it to everyone I see, and call it "liberating the Dew". What maudlin crap!

And congratulations on worst analogy of the day. Copying is not theft, and this isn't even copyright infringement. Now, if you invented a Star Trek replicator and used it to make copies of Mountain Dew, you would be just in your actions, and stopping it would be an act of insanity.

I am an attorney involved in civil litigation and I use PACER on a regular basis. For those who don't know, this is how it works. If you are involved in the litigation, the first time you open a pleading, you are not charged for accessing the pleading. And you can download it in PDF form for free whenever you access it, so if you download it the first time, you can re-read it for free whenever you want. Every other time you access it via PACER though, you are charged for accessing it. This isn't like iTunes where you buy a song once and it's yours. If you are not a litigant in a particular case, you are charged for accessing each pleading the first time you access it and every subsequent time as well.

[edit] I see some people have mentioned copyrighted works. Please note that PACER fees do not go to the author of the document you're downloading, even in part. They are access fees, not copyright license fees. [/edit]

For a midsize firm like mine, these charges (which range from a few cents to a few dollars per document, depending on its length) are just part of overhead. But for a pro se litigant or an impoverished private citizen interested in following litigation that may indirectly affect him or her (despite not being a party to that litigation), these charges may, in my opinion, form a barrier to access to justice. I think a better solution would be to switch the revenue generated from *accessing* documents to revenue generated by *filing* documents. Litigants proceeding "in forma pauperis" would still be exempt from these fees, just like they're exempt from other filing fees. Other litigants could pay them. And this way, concerned citizens could follow court proceedings online without having to pay to do so.

What tax would you rather have imposed upon you to pay for the resources to host this information? It isn't free, and it isn't cheap. The docs aren't on a USB hard drive connected to someone's laptop going out over a cable modem.

Honestly, I'd rather be taxed for the infrastructure and know it was paid for directly, as it should be. Or are you going to argue that taxes shouldn't pay for significant and core infrastructure? Well, let's tear down the interstates (and everything else) I guess.

In turn I'd like to see access fees be only that: fees to cover real access costs.

But ideally, I would prefer that the system not have any access fees: access to the underpinnings of our justice system should not have a direct financial restriction which in turn most discriminates against those without the income to make such costs trivial.

@knbgnuYour saying that you're willing to work in an environment with pattern criminals who have no regard for your laws and rules simply because they are nonviolent? Thats just silly and puts the rest of us good citizens in a shitty position. A criminal id s criminal and they need to be punished and probably sent to jail. Also your making it seem like swartz is the common type of nonviolent criminal being locked up. He isn't most of the things your saying while true are generally referring to nonviolent drug criminals.

If by pattern criminals you mean people that use and/or sell drugs, yes, I have no problems with that. In fact, most of the people I know have engaged in such behavior. I have no problem with people who cause occasional mischief on computer systems either.

Bullshit laws should be ignored if not actively defied. The CFAA as written and pertaining to the Swartz case is bullshit, as are our drug laws are bullshit, and our copyright laws are bullshit. Enforcing the law just because it is the law is the height of idiocy.

I'm not sure how much a PDF should cost or if it should be based on a per page fee, but I'm pretty sure the $0.10/page charge comes from what the States and Federal Government have historically charged as 'copying fees' for FOIA requests. The public is free to come and read the papers the government has stored but you can't take the documents off site. If you wanted to take them with you off site, the charge was for use of the Xerox.

Personally I think the charge is a bit high and was done just because the Government didn't want to deal with people bugging them all the time for 'free'. The cost was thought to be high enough, so that only actually interested parties would be willing to cough up the cost.